


Not what you'd call properly submissive

by pushdragon



Series: Small Business 101 [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: AU, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes Recovering (from a different kind of trauma), Bucky Barnes is fresh out of prison, Competence Kink, Dom Steve Rogers, M/M, Pining, Service Top, Small Business 101, Steve Rogers is the softest dom, T'Challa owns a BDSM club
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-16
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:28:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22754008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pushdragon/pseuds/pushdragon
Summary: Steve's wholesome take on domination has suddenly become the hottest thing in the business. He should be cashing in on his newfound celebrity, but instead he's distracted by the guy who works odd shifts in the club's bar, fresh out of prison and damaged in ways that don't show. (Sequel to Some Things You Do For Money.)
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Small Business 101 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1619494
Comments: 113
Kudos: 317





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> OK, so this is the start of 15,000 words of sort-of sequel. It's more like scenes that sketch out their future, semi-chronologically. They're not a complete story in the way the first 14 chapters were, which is why I'm posting them separately. Also, you can see I used up all my words in the story and I have no good chapter titles left.

Bucky is a good teacher, it turns out. Very good. 

Luckily, Steve is a poor enough student that he still gets to spend a couple of hours on the dance floor with Bucky's hands patiently positioning his hips and his shoulders, while his hot breath directs instructions in his ear. 

Afterwards, they very nearly have sex in the alley beside his building before he remembers about the cameras. It doesn't stop them. The footage is nicely grainy, shot from high up. He's watched it twice before he realises that what he'd taken for an accidental gesture – Bucky looking up from Steve's ravenously keen blow job to tuck his hair behind one ear – is actually highly deliberate. He turns for a half-second, and gives a tiny salute towards the camera, just the tips of two fingers touched against his temple, as if he'd known how Steve was going to give into temptation and pull the video out of the deletion cycle. 

"I thought you'd have that running up on the wall by now," Bucky says, coming out of the bedroom dressed for a club shift. "Nice to have a bit of quality cinema for your day off."

Steve watches the sly gesture again and again. "Did you plan that?"

"Did I plan the fact that your first dance lesson was going to make you so wild you'd want to suck me off in a public place? Is that your question? I don't actually remember having much of a choice in the matter."

Steve's so indignant he almost shuts the video off. "Well you'd been grinding up against me most of the night."

"Oh, the grinding. Heavens above, Steve, don't be so green. It only looks dirty until you get used to it," Bucky says with a wink in his voice. "A bit like your job. Don't you spend all day watching that stuff."

He bends to kiss Steve lightly on the forehead and slips away from his grasping hands. "Uh-uh. You hold onto that thought. When I come home from six hours shifting boxes, I might just be interested."

**

It's a few days later, the morning that Bucky goes out to claim the fruits of his hard-won victory over bureaucracy. He comes back stepping lightly, presumably with a reinstated driver's licence in his pocket, and pushes the door shut noisily behind himself. 

"Come here, will you Bucky?" Steve says in a voice that's anything but a request, from where he's drying dishes at the sink.

Bucky throws his jacket onto the sofa and comes slowly towards him, in what is very much an answer, or at least an invitation to negotiate. His attention snaps to an immediate focus, as if Steve's only suggesting something he spent the whole bus ride home imagining. Steve loves him any way he can have him, but this sort of mood, when they're both a match to each other's powder keg, might be his favourite. 

As soon as he's got close enough, Steve pulls him in with a hand around the side of his neck and kisses his mouth, and his reaction to that is still up in the stratosphere, when Steve kisses him like he's going to eat Bucky from the inside and make him like it. He goes pliant under Steve's grip, with a little murmur of satisfaction as if he was the one who'd just taken exactly what he wanted.

They've got so many different speeds of kissing between them now, from playful to consoling, but this one is still the surest territory, rough with open hunger. Bucky's hands aren't on him yet. It's going to be one of those days he wants Steve to push him around a little. Bucky keeps on letting it happen, lets himself get breathy and soft, until Steve breaks it off. 

"I'm on the clock in fifteen minutes," Bucky tells him then, tilting his chin down a fraction so he can glance up provokingly through his lashes. "You don’t have anything more useful you'd rather do with me?" 

Steve does, but he makes him wait, untucks Bucky's shirt enough to run his hand up beneath it, tweaking and groping at his leisure as the colour rises in Bucky's face and his lashes start to flutter distractedly.

"You drive me crazy when you get like this."

"Hmmm," Bucky says dizzily, attention skating to Steve's mouth like it does when he's waiting to be kissed some more. "Isn't that lucky for me?"

This time, Steve pulls Bucky against him and tastes the depths of his mouth until he's making needy noises. "That's sweet," Steve says, pulling back to brush their lips together, grazing side to side. "You're so sweet for me some days."

"Steve."

His eyes are soft and slow, asking for what he's not going to reach out and take for himself.

"You're all worked up, baby." When he reaches down, Bucky proves him right by grinding back against his hand and getting speedily hard. "How about I give you something to take your mind off it?"

Bucky makes a very affirmative sound and his face lights up with purpose. 

"May I?" he asks with the insolence Steve's never had the heart to school out of him, hands hooked into Steve's belt.

"If you like."

A few moments later he's down on his knees. Steve wouldn't have said he had a checklist for mind-blowing oral sex, until Bucky started to give it to him on a regular basis. A slow start so he can watch Bucky's wide mouth opening up to kiss him, wet lips dragging softly against the hot length of him. Unflagging eye contact. Sparing use of fingers and hands. A bit of gasping and groaning with Steve's cockhead against his soft palate; a mindless long stretch of his lips cinching tight and true around his shaft until the pleasure's spilling out of him, too hot and heavy to hold back. And god, the hungry pink swipe of Bucky's tongue right over the leaking head of him, that's so fucking erotic he has to grip the sink behind him and slam his eyes shut while the last of it shakes through him. 

Bucky tucks him away deftly and zips him back up. 

"There. Always good to start the work day with a team building exercise." 

The way he sucks his lip into his mouth is pure provocation. 

Steve pulls him up by the shirt, and spins them around. It takes one sweep of his arm to tumble all the dishes back into the sink so he can wrench open the buttons on Bucky's jeans and sit him up there. 

"Oh," Bucky says, wriggling a little against the warm, sudsy surface beneath his ass. Then he goes still, legs pretty much immobilised by the denim around his knees, as Steve takes him in hand and jerks him good and fast until he's got both hands clenched in Steve's shirt, breathing heavy and panting out Steve's name like it's the only word left in his vocabulary. Steve watches the dark head of Bucky's cock cinch in his fist, thinking how well he knows the feel of him now, knows just how dry Bucky can take it, knows how to shape his fingers to the pace and pressure it takes to get him really worked up. 

He's fallen into that telltale breathless silence when Steve leans in, pressing mindless kisses under his jaw. Bucky makes a half-pained murmur and gives it up, spilling hot over his hand. 

When his head's clear enough, he stretches over to run the tap and wash his fingers off, with a regretful glance over the mess in the sink. He picks up Bucky's favourite mug, the one with the sepia dance hall photo captioned with _work is for people who don't jitterbug_. There's a fresh white chip in the rim.

"Sorry. I'll get you a new one."

"Don't you dare."

He takes it from Steve's grasp, and shakes the water off, and sets it on the shelf above him, with the chip facing proudly out.

"Hey," he asks, brushing Steve's rumpled hair back off his face. "As a small business owner, are you the kind of boss who'd fire an employee if he cancelled a shift to spend the whole day in bed with his filthy hot boyfriend and finish off that last season of 24?"

Steve's smiling as he leans in to kiss him, one last time, slow. 

"I think I'm the kind of boss who knows how to recognise initiative in an employee and reward it the way it deserves."

**

At first they both lie quietly, keeping one of those silences that takes care not to deepen the cracks. Bucky's never called yellow before, let alone gone straight to red a few seconds later. From what he hears of Steve's sessions through the door, he's pretty sure that sort of thing doesn't happen very often, and certainly not over the same set of restraints he's worn half a dozen times before.

He tells himself again that it's not a failure, to have one fucking night he just couldn't stand the thought of having his hands bound. Since he turned off the light, he can't read Steve's reaction in the dark beside him.

"You know it's not you, right?"

At last, Steve turns on his side and leans in, leaving an experimental kiss on Bucky's arm.

"Would I sound like a dick if I said yes?"

When Bucky laughs, it's just a bit shaky. Leaving a careful buffer of space, Steve leans in and starts kissing his shoulder, working under the line of his collar bone. The tight breath comes out of Bucky in a gust of relief. He's not going to say sorry for having boundaries, but he can let Steve do as much of this as he wants, nuzzle against his chest and cover him in a slow shower of kisses, making Bucky believe a bit harder with each one that it's all going to be okay.

"You wanna tell me what it is?"

Bucky shakes his head. "There's no reason." Or there's lots of reasons. A hard night's work and shrill political headlines and assholes on the bus and the shop always being out of the one kind of soup he wants. "Just couldn't get into it."

Steve kisses to one side of his nipple, just close enough to give him a faint shiver of longing.

"Yeah, I got that. I haven't got it perfect yet, but I can mostly feel when you're getting into the struggle of it. Tonight you were … you weren't there." 

"Hmmm," is all Bucky says, as much to the reassuring rhythm of Steve's kisses as the words themselves. 

"It's okay. That's what we have safewords for. You know, that, don't you?"

He kind of did, but all the same it's good to hear. 

Steve leans back and says, "You know what's really good for that kind of mood?"

From the playful tone, he's pretty sure the sort of thing Steve is going to suggest, and all of a sudden he wants it fiercely, that thing that Steve always calls _connection_ and finds endlessly inventive ways to create. He may be too fragile for cuffs today but, right now, he still wants Steve to bypass his conscious mind and tap right into the dumb, tender core of him, pulling pleasure out of him until he's drifting, light as a balloon in Steve's hands. 

"What's really good for that, Steve? Show me." 

He's not wrong. 

**

His second conversation with the Widow about dominance and submission skews a little more interesting. She's telling him about the trip she's just come back from – a weekend with a congressman in the southern states somewhere – while she watches him stock the bar fridges with a little more focus than the routine task really calls for.

"You're not interested in exploring the scene?" she breaks off to ask, while he's crouched down to wrestle with a tangle of packing tape on second box. "Outside of Steve's way of doing it?"

He hadn't thought about it, apart from noting that none of the other doms in the place could quite match Steve's combination of physical strength and deliberate, constantly telegraphed, gentleness. 

"What am I missing out on?"

"That's what you'd be finding out." She swirls the vodka, lime and soda he poured for her, eyes on the ice. "If you're ever curious, let me know."

Bucky laughs at that. A lot of people treat Natasha with the same deference as Steve, either obtrusively friendly or cautiously distant, but he recognised too much in her nervy determination to stay ahead of the game and never let circumstances take her by surprise to be afraid of her. 

He shoots the cider bottles onto the shelf, one by one, with a satisfying rhythmic clink. "With your rates? I could only dream about it." 

"I'm going through a good patch right now. Like I said. You wouldn't have to worry about it." 

He stands up to face her and wipes his hands on his jeans.

"Is this a competitive thing? You weren't that interested in showing me the ropes before."

"Before?" she asks. 

He meets her gaze levelly. "Before Steve."

"We don't compete, the Captain and me. We're not in the same game."

That surprises him, since the two of them are so often mentioned in the same breath, the two big stars of the club, and it must show. 

"This is what I mean by exploring," she says with a curl of her lip.

He gives that a considering nod, not tempted, but getting more curious by the moment about where her offer is coming from.

"Well, how about you be the one to find out how Steve feels about me seeing another dom."

He leans back against the fridge counter and watches the light catch her eyes. "Possessive, is he? He never seemed the type before." 

Remembering his first impression, of Steve walking around in a bubble, he thinks maybe he wasn't the only one paying attention.

Bucky shrugs. "Ask him. If you're game. He'll be in tonight."

He knows the moment she does it. He's serving customers when he catches sight of Steve, moving quick as a storm cloud towards the bar and wearing an expression of anguish. Bucky finishes his careful measure of gin and adds the tonic and twists of lime in each glass, and quells the instinct to do whatever it takes to ease that look off his face. 

No, he thinks, pouring out a pinot noir for the next customer and leaving Steve to cool his heels. You can be the one who has to decide where to draw the boundaries this time, and try not to be selfish about it. You can carry that weight. 

"She could have anyone," Steve tells him a bit later, heart in his eyes. "All she has to do is want it." 

"You think I'm that easy, do you?"

He hasn't forgotten that fight they had, weeks and weeks ago now, that ended with Steve's wounded assertion that he could draw a line between intimacy with a client and what the two of them were building together. He doesn't think it's petty of him to want Steve to understand what that leap of faith feels like, to keep giving yourself to someone who's not quite yours exclusively. If it turns into an argument, he's pretty sure he's got the high moral ground. But it shouldn't have to be an argument. 

"Yes or no, Steve?" 

In the end, he can only say yes. Well, his voice says yes. The hunched line of his shoulders and his pinched expression and everything else about him says the opposite. Bucky remembers that feeling, distantly, of bestowing trust and half expecting betrayal, like a door left unwillingly open.

They use one of the rooms at the club, in the mid-afternoon when it's empty. She's wearing her leather catsuit, boots instead of spike heels, but still very much in character whereas Steve doesn't even like to touch him until he's got the jacket and tie off at least. She watches him closely as she fastens him onto the cross, though he's pretty sure what she's searching for is the imprint left on him by someone else.

The cane strokes lightly over his briefs, letting him register the hardness of it before she strikes. 

He doesn't hate it. He just can't quite get the point of it, like looking at an abstract sculpture that he can't read anything into beyond its literal elements weirdly juxtaposed.

She wants him to call her Mistress, and it's easy to let himself bend to her, easier than showing his tenders spots by picking when to fight. The shape of her, sinuously feminine, doesn't set him off the way Steve used to; her coolly delivered commands don’t dredge up the worst of his past. But there's a menacing thread in her that keeps him on edge. With her slightness and sculpted beauty, she's had to force her way through the world, while Steve's physical presence has given him a life of deference and crowds parting. She's edged and sharp, while Steve is someone you can throw yourself against and never bruise.

There's nothing layered about her power dynamic: she likes to hurt people, to make her clients push themselves into the pain as far as they can go. His bare thighs are raw and burning before long, and that, the depth of sensation digging down into his muscles, that's something new. It sparks his curiosity. He can hear himself breathing hard. 

There's a moment, swamped in mounting localised pain, where he can almost get into it. She's tremendously sexy, and the will of her is like a strong wind. His ears are pricked for the singing tension of her tightly fitted leather, and his eye is as deeply drawn to the subtly lowering zip of her catsuit as it would be to any beautiful thing. If he focused on the leather, and her body underneath it, he could maybe get hard. 

But there's something missing. All that love that Steve poured into his work when he couldn't connect with anyone outside it, the bond that he's so generous about building with all his clients and that, between the two of them, has fleshed out into something instant and enduring. Between him and Natasha, it's just … cool. She has the detached focus of a medical professional or an examiner. He guesses a lot of people like that nonchalance. Hell, he would have liked it, if she'd offered him this when he was fresh out of prison and keeping the world at a mistrustful distance. It would have been exactly up his alley. She would have enabled him in shoring up all the barriers inside himself he'd spent those long years building, and he would have thanked her for it. 

He doesn't know much about her. Her family's Russian, she came here in high school, and that's old enough for permanently damaging things to have happened to her before she left, or on desperate border crossings, or in the supposed sanctuary of this country. 

"That's two movie nights you haven't come to," he says when they're drinking vodka sodas at the bar afterwards, her attention still on him as if how he handles the wind-down is another fact she wants to know. "How come? I know he's invited you."

She gives him the same inscrutable, mildly interested look she's worn for the last hour. "I keep pretty busy."

"Well, try to find time. I know he'd like you to come. And you could use a good steak dinner, gotta keep up the strength in those arms."

She doesn't offer to debrief, or cuddle, or stroke his hair, and he doesn't ask.

When he gets home, Steve is stewing up a big batch of beef mince and supermarket tomatoes into Bucky's favourite pasta sauce. Bucky puts a hand on his hip and noses into his hair to kiss the nape of his neck, but he's too tense to shiver the way Bucky likes. 

"Smells good. I'm gonna take a shower."

When he comes back, damp hair tied back, he's carrying the leather gloves, and the collar that he hasn't worn since that photo shoot months ago, that he had to really dig behind the newer equipment to find, carefully coiled, right at the back of the shelf.

"Put that on me?"

Steve's still an open book. Bucky can see in a look how long he's been waiting for the moment to ask for permission to get that collar out. 

"Go on." He lifts up the escaped strands of hair at the back of his neck to let Steve do it. It feels good, the softly worn leather and Steve's gentle hands, familiar and onion-smelling from his cooking, that keep rubbing lightly at his skin once the task is complete. "I'm not in any condition for you to go to town with this tonight," Bucky tells him, letting him touch. "I think I'm going to be pretty bruised up." He holds up the leather gloves. "But maybe you can touch me a little with these."

He's kissing Bucky's shoulder, nuzzling his shirt aside to get to bare skin, one finger still hooked in the collar ring. "I can do that. Anything you want, Bucky."

Bucky leans back into it, the gentle pull of the leather against his throat, and thinks how it makes him feel peaceful instead of excited, unexpectedly soothing. 

"And if you still think she wants me, you're wrong. She might be burning a bit of a candle for you, though. In her frosty sort of way." He turns in Steve's arms, and kisses his mouth, soft, with a stroke of his tongue against Steve's top lip that finally earns him the shudder he wanted. "Guess she's only human after all."

The spaghetti is pretty delicious. Even better is the intense hunger in Steve's eyes every time he looks up and sees the collar sitting above the neck of Bucky's t-shirt, just as electric the fiftieth time as it was the first. 

It turns out that the caress of leather over his naked skin, in combination with the passionate heat of Steve's mouth, turns him into a jumble of uninhibited moans and hoarse encouragement. Steve is too deeply into it to say anything about the darkening bruises, and in a week, they're gone anyway. 

**

"You're still sleeping around, though," Bucky says when Steve forwards him the email with the test results and watches him open the attachment across the room. 

"Yeah, but who chooses my clients and negotiates what they can have?"

Bucky looks smug at that. "Well, you did have a few disasters before I came along."

That had been the start of the conversation, actually. Steve finding a quiet morning to mention that the only client who really demanded penetrative sex had been Stuart, who was now – he'd made a hand-wavy gesture that hopefully conveyed _seeing a counsellor at last and trying hard to make things up with his wife._

The end of the conversation is the way Bucky is looking at him now, clean bill of health in his hand, eyes hooded and full of anticipation. 

Steve gives it a couple of days for that anticipation to build up. He clears his diary for Wednesday and puts a conspicuous blank appointment in the calendar through two whole days.

Bucky's in the shower when he gets back from the gym, like he's already decided which way he wants it to go the first time they do this. Steve pulls the blanket off the bed and spreads a couple of towels out between the sheets, piles up all the pillows at one end, tucks everything in nice and neat and thinks he could have done with a red rose to lay across it, the way he feels right now. He gets the cuffs out of the bottom drawer, even though they don't use them all that often these days. Because he wants to get Bucky to that place where he loses all that cynicism and formidable self-discipline and lets himself go. It takes time to get there. Time that Bucky is usually too impatient to give him unless he's restrained. 

"You're back early," Bucky observes from the doorway. 

Steve finds himself smiling. "The treadmill just wasn't doing it for me this morning. I had some other things on my mind."

It looks like he started dressing himself from the ankles up, and stopped half-way when he realised how little point there was. Steve pulls him in for a kiss, delving into the sharp mint of his mouth while his palms drink in the warmth of his bare skin and the hard muscle down his sides and back, relishing the strength of his arms holding them together. 

It's different, later, when he's got them on the bed, Bucky's wrists restrained behind him. All that strength may be negated, but Bucky's got comfortable with the cuffs now. He doesn't sit passively. He wields his limited mobility to devastating effect, nipping and teasing at Steve's mouth until his patience hits its limits and he pulls Bucky down to him with a rough hand in his hair and takes his mouth the way he wants it, for as long as he wants it. His eyes are dark when Steve's finished with him, hungrily focused as Steve's thumb traces from his cheek down to his collarbone, then down to one nipple which he strokes until it hardens for him and then leans in to suck into this mouth. It takes a minute or two before Bucky's starting to make soft little _uhs_ of frustrated pleasure, accompanied by the jingle of the chains. 

Pulling back, Steve asks, "Are you ready to suck me off now?" 

Bucky's eyes blaze. "You think you needed to warm me up for that?" 

He strips Bucky off properly first, kissing down his stomach, over his hip, letting them both take note of how flushed and aroused he is from the warm-up he says he didn't need. Steve gives him a couple of loose strokes on the way, just because he can, just to make him catch his breath. 

"Here," he says, and gets Bucky back up on his knees so he can finger comb his hair back. He takes his time, lets Bucky lean back into him as he massages his scalp and presses kisses behind his ear. Then he gathers his hair into one strand, folds it over itself, and ties it back the way Bucky likes. 

"Is that all right?" 

"It'll do." 

He shifts Bucky off the bed, kneeling on a folded towel on the floor. 

"Don't get impatient," he says when Bucky glances pointedly down. 

Bucky shifts uncomfortably on his knees. "Tell me what you want then." 

"I want to feel the whole of your mouth working me. Don't rush it. Take your time and feel every inch of me going into you." 

Bucky's face is flushed and the pulse is working hard in his throat. 

"I want that, Steve." But he's hesitating. "Take the cuffs off." 

Steve gives that the disappointed look it deserves, but Bucky goes on. "I don't need them. Not today." 

Steve takes his chin in his hand. "You think you get a say in how I make use of your body now?" He turns his face into Steve's palm, presses a kiss into it. "Come on, Buck. You've got colours. Use them if you need to." 

When Bucky looks up at him, it's direct and unafraid. "I'm not tapping out. I'm asking. Please. I don't want to be tied up for this." 

And Steve is going to have to come up with a retirement plan right away, because these months with Bucky have made him soft as jelly. He unlocks the cuffs and rubs his thumbs over Bucky's wrists, the place where the abrasions would be if he didn't go so soft on Bucky every single time. 

Bucky puts his hands on Steve's thighs, shuffles forward between his feet and pulls Steve down into another kiss, the sort he rarely initiates. 

"Steve," he murmurs, flicking delicately with his tongue.

Then he uses his hands one last time, to get Steve's pants open, lays his palms flat against the sheets, and follows Steve's instructions precisely.

It's almost too much to bear, the slick sound of it, the leisurely pace, how seriously Bucky takes the challenge, screwing Steve's dick further into his throat each time he goes down. Before long, Steve's toes are curling against the floor and he's brushing the hair back from Bucky's forehead, so he can see more of his face. 

"You wanna come?" Bucky asks, taking the head of Steve's dick back into his mouth and lewdly tracing the contours of it with his lips on the outstroke. 

"I want to fuck you for as long as I can. So yeah, make me come." 

Bucky's eyebrows flex as if to say _challenge accepted_ and his idle ministrations turn purposeful, picking up rhythm and speed until, that's it, Steve's coming dizzyingly hard against the back of his throat. It's an exquisite piece of pornography, the way Bucky pulls back to catch the last of it over his lips, leaving a white trail down to his chin that he thumbs away and sucks clean. 

When Steve pulls himself up from where he's flopped back into the sheets, Bucky's still kneeling at his feet, hands in his lap and looking insolent behind the eagerness. It's going to be a fair while before he'll be able to get hard again, and it's immediately clear to both of them what he's going to do with that time. 

He stretches Bucky out over his lap and warms him up slowly, with the pad of his thumb, then a couple of slick fingers working into him, one at a time. He can't help taking his time with this, remembering how Bucky used to do it for himself, efficient and functional, with none of the squirming pleasure that Steve's learned how to work out of him when he gets the angle right. 

He gets the angle right, and then deliberately wrong, and then right again until Bucky's grinding hard against his thigh. Then he reorients them and switches to his mouth, an act that he knows Bucky still finds excruciatingly over-intimate and helplessly arousing all at the same time. 

"Oh Jesus, no," Bucky groans into the bed, while Steve takes his time to work over him, and into him, and lets himself be grateful that Bucky has got his hands free and at least two different safewords he could use if he wanted to. "You're killing me. Steve."

He doesn't let up until Bucky, struggling under nearly an hour of unrelenting build-up, is starting to let out soft cries of distress. 

Then he pulls Bucky back into his lap and keeps fucking him with his fingers, real slow. "Don't want you too loose. I want to feel you around me." 

Bucky pulls the elastic out of his hair as if he knows how the soft length of it drives Steve crazy, and kisses his neck, his ear, in between the moans he's stopped making any attempt to stifle, and that's so perfect that Steve just drifts with it, losing sight of his objective completely, until Bucky leans back and reaches between them. 

"Promising," he murmurs, and reaches down to where Steve's starting to get worked up again, off the friction of their bodies moving together.

They both watch, as he strokes himself with slick afterwards, firming up the flushed, gleaming length of him, both of them thinking the same thing. 

"Take it slow, Buck," he says with a sense of command he does not feel. "Wanna feel you relax into it. Fuck, you're so hot like this." 

Bucky shifts, arm hooked around Steve's neck for balance, and lines himself up, and then he's got Steve's dick lodged against the one part of him with give in it, and he's pushing back, making his body surrender. 

"You've got no idea how good this feels. I never-" Bucky's cry when he bottoms out is practically agony. 

Steve holds his hips and shifts in and out, closing up the last inch between them until he's pressed right into the meat of Bucky's ass. 

"Oh god," Bucky says out nowhere. "I could come from this. Just this. Just your dick sliding into me." 

Steve's never seen him like this, so lost in sensation his eyes are closed, his head tipping back. They find a rhythm that's short, shallow strokes that must rub the ridge of his cockhead over Bucky's prostate, alternating with deeper penetration that Bucky slams himself down into. Bucky's driving it now, sure of what he wants, his supple hips and thighs bending him into the angles he needs. Steve lies back on one elbow, with his eyes squeezed shut, trying to hold on against the erotic onslaught of the noises Bucky's making, abandoned and deep with need. 

"Stop," he has to say, clutching onto Bucky's hips. "Bucky, give me a –" 

He's surprised by the fierce growl that comes out of his mouth, his orgasm so close he has to bite it back to keep it inside himself. 

"Steve," Bucky whispers, sounding wrecked. "God I've never had it like this." 

He's taking himself in hand, stroking slow, eyes open to bare slits as he looks down at Steve. "God, it's-" If he can't find the words, Steve can see them written across his face. "This is the filthiest fucking thing I've ever done." 

He's ecstatically turned on, so far out of his head he's got no shred of self-restraint left, just the whispered pleas he continues to let out. Steve's body is aching with the need to come. 

"Go on," he says, hands sliding up to Bucky's waist. "Wreck yourself on my cock, I wanna feel you come." 

And Bucky braces his knees more firmly against the mattress, and folds Steve's hand around his cock, and closes his eyes and tips his head back and grinds himself down hard and fast until they both do.

"Fuck," he moans later, tumbled forward with his forehead against Steve's chest, their bodies slipping apart already. 

"How do you feel?" 

"Wet. God, I'm fucking full of you." 

"Good, then?" 

"I wanna keep you inside me and do it again in a minute, on my hands and knees this time, you holding me down from behind." 

Steve makes a noise of discomfort at the thought of getting hard again.

"Oh," Bucky says, flicking his hair to one side and laughing that completely weightless laugh that only sex endorphins seem to bring out in him. "You wanna make this all about you now, do you?"

But he pulls a washcloth and a bottle off the side table, and pours the water straight into Steve's parched mouth, and then cleans up the mess they've made of each other. 

Later, he lies flaked out across the bed with Steve's head on his chest, fingers stroking gently down his neck. 

"I can still feel you dripping out of me," he says, eyes closed. "Fuck, that is too much".

Steve spends a few moments pondering whether or not to bite back the question. "You never did it bare in prison?" 

He seems to need a few moments to get his thoughts straight. 

"I never did it so it felt like this. Never wanted to do it again straight after so I could stay full of you." His voice drops away to almost nothing. "Never saw the point of those plugs to keep it all up inside me for good." 

Steve's heart actually stops for a moment, then catches up in a flurry. He turns his face into Bucky's chest and kisses him weakly. "If-" He swallows and starts again. "If you asked me for that, sometime when you're not half out of your mind with the come-down, you'd make me so happy."

"Well," Bucky says, finger softly tracing the shell of his ear. "That's what I'm here for."


	2. Chapter 2

Bucky stares at the crisp notes in disbelief. "He's actually tipping higher now that he's a part-owner of the premises."

Coming back from the bathroom with his shirt off and a cold cloth against the back of his neck, Steve says, "Well I worked for every cent of that today."

"I thought Will was one of your easy ones?"

Steve thinks about that while he runs the cloth over his face, feeling professionally satisfied and nicely warmed up. "His headspace is straightforward. That's what makes him easy. He likes to get pretty physical in a session though."

From Bucky's expression, he wonders whether he ought to leave the door ajar for Will's sessions as well, to stop his imagination running wilder than it needs to. But Bucky just holds the money out between his fingers. 

"You need the cash? Otherwise I'll put it in the banking for Tuesday."

"You can bank my half. Thanks."

He watches Bucky open up one of his spreadsheets to enter the figure in it, and realises it's been months since he looked at his business accounts, even to review them. 

"Hey Buck, you want to go away somewhere?" Bucky's fingers pause over the keys. "You know what Bruce says, the low rates are a good thing now that I've got more debt and less investments, and you've worked a lot of seven-day weeks. We could get away for a bit. See something." 

For just a second, Bucky looks unaccountably sad, keeping his attention firmly on the screen as he taps in a few more alterations.

"Not yet. I've got other things to take care of first. You going to wash up for Sofia or go in there smelling like a locker room?"

When he looks up, his face is full of fond challenge, and the sadness has vanished.

**

"Steve," Bucky says one day, curled up at the opposite end of the sofa with a cushion over his lap, looking thoughtful. "You work out a lot, right?" 

"Those half-day sessions every Monday and Wednesday aren't for nothing," Steve replies, still flicking through headlines on his phone.

"You ever test that out?" 

Something about the oddness of the question finally snags his attention and he puts the phone away. "How do you mean?" 

Bucky's watching him with quiet intensity. "You must be pretty strong. You ever – Think you're stronger than me?" 

They're half-watching a documentary about the GFC, so these thoughts are coming from somewhere else entirely. There's a light in Bucky's eyes that says he's definitely got a destination in mind for this line of questioning. 

"I'd say so." 

"You seem pretty sure." 

"Happy to test it out any time you want to." 

"All right," Bucky says softly.

A minute later they're kneeling on opposite sides of the coffee table. Bucky plants his elbow and tilts his hand towards Steve in invitation. 

"Okay then. Let's see what you've got." 

It's a new feeling, the muscle of Bucky's hand tightening around him, and he likes it. His blood is heating up, because even more than the satisfaction of victory, he's going to get a thrill out of overcoming Bucky's strength to get there. 

"On three," Bucky says, meeting Steve's gaze with an expression that's gone a bit bedroomy. 

He gives it his best, at the outset. The both do, hands white knuckled and trembling as they push together. Then gradually Bucky starts to give way. He doesn’t make it easy; in fact when he rallies at about 30 degrees Steve thinks for a shocked moment that he's read this wrong and Bucky wants to win. But a moment after that he's got Bucky's knuckles down on the table, and they're both breathing hard, and Bucky's looking at him all hooded and soft, not quite in the way Steve has got to know. There's an eagerness to him, banked and waiting, an electricity that's waiting for Steve to give it a conduit. 

"You do a lot of work on your arms," Bucky says, enough challenge in that to make Steve snap back at him. 

"I do a lot of work everywhere. You need me to prove that too?" 

Bucky shrugs with his expression, and it's the last straw. It takes a moment for Steve to shove the table aside and lunge at him. Their hands join and grapple. Bucky puts up enough resistance to get them pressed up together, enough to demonstrate the raw power in his arms and shoulders, enough that Steve's got a sheen of sweat on his forehead by the time he gets Bucky pressed down on the floor, slams his hands down and looms over him. The fight goes out of him, and he lets Steve pin him, though his expression goes troubled and evasive. 

"Bucky?" 

He takes a firm grip on Bucky's wrist and pulls it up over his head to pins it there. Bucky doesn't answer, still doesn't fight him, but his face remains turned away. Steve hesitates, letting himself wish for just a moment that Bucky wasn't so averse to the sort of detailed session planning he does with his clients, or at least giving him a bit of warning when he's going to initiate something. 

"There are two ways up of this floor. You say stop, and we stop, and I make you a cup of tea and we talk. Or you do everything I tell you to until I decide I'm done." 

He bends down to nose against the warm skin behind Bucky's ear, into his hair, kissing over his skittering pulse. He gives Bucky a chance to call a halt. But he doesn't, and Steve can feel it again, that electricity in his skin that only wants a way out, that's so deeply at odds with what Steve can read on his face. 

"The first thing I'm going to do is undress you." 

He's barely reached down when Bucky's hand twitches; he pounces hard and pins it back in place. 

"I can tear you out of those one-handed," Steve tells him. "Or you can do as you're told and stay still."

He takes his time after that, strips Bucky out of his track pants and the shirt that wasn't his to begin with. When he twists away from a proprietorial squeeze, Steve gets him in a wrestling grip, lying over one of Bucky's arms and gripping the wrist of the other, the whole naked front of him exposed. He pulls against the grip until Steve tightens it even further, giving him all the leverage he needs to touch Bucky just exactly as he pleases.

That's the last of the struggle. Breathless, Bucky lets him have his way, feeling up all the muscled contours of his chest, and plucking at his nipples until they're tender and hard, and stroking his dick in a loose grip that must be half way to torture. He lies unresisting in Steve's grasp, and once or twice, he even murmurs encouragement. Before long, Steve can let go of him to kiss his way down his stomach and dip his tongue into his navel, and that of all things is what teases a strangled cry of pleasure out of him at last. 

"That's it," Steve murmurs, holding him down again when he starts to move his hips. "Give it up for me."

But Bucky's quiet today. Greedy for a reaction, Steve slides back onto him, shoving his full weight down as if the erotic charge from before was something that could be juiced out of him under sufficient force. He jerks him purposefully, all impatience and none of his usual teasing, and the more he twists away, the faster Steve's fist works, until he's coming, and cursing, and jolting underneath him. 

Almost immediately afterwards, Bucky pulls in on himself, shutting off instead of letting the release of it open him up. It's taken a while, but Steve's got a better read these days on when to push him. He lets him go, without question, only to watch him disappear into the bathroom and shut the door. The shower runs. 

Afterwards, he makes a tea with the stuff Steve laid out for him, brings it back to the sofa, but doesn't drink. It's quiet for a long time. There are deep lines of unease on Bucky's face. He's usually at his most open in the moments after Steve's made him come, inhibitions down low.

"You want to talk?"

Bucky shakes his head and reaches over to tap the laptop back into life.

"All right. But we're not doing that again until you're ready to have a conversation about it."

Bucky turns terse. "That's okay by me."

The documentary starts up again, ominous shots of busy stock market trading floors and tumbling numbers. 

Something feels off between them, but when he plays the afternoon back, he's damned if he can see what it is. After all these months of prising Bucky open, he knows when he's being shut out. When he goes to reach out, Bucky subtly turns his shoulder. They sit at opposite ends of the sofa and watch the financial system fall to pieces. 

Bucky's quiet all the next morning, distracted while he works. Though he's sitting where he always sits, with the computer on his knees, he seems detached and distant, not like himself at all. It reminds Steve of those first few weeks, before they found the rhythm of talking to each other, when he was closed off and permanently skittish.

"If I did something wrong, you need to find a way to tell me."

Bucky gives him a reproachful look. 

"I'm listening," Steve reiterates. "I want to know what happened."

"Okay," he replies, clearly hesitant. "Remember, you asked for this." He wets his bottom lip nervously with his tongue. "So I told you I did plenty of fucking when I was inside. Most of it was … better than any other options I had at the time. Most of it I was on board with, at least. But not all of it. There were some times … times I don't think about, and it won't do anyone any good if I start to blab about them now. It's years too late for that."

The whole experience of last night sours immediately in Steve's mind, to compare it with that. What had been a kind of awkwardly exciting, turns sinister. The thought of Bucky in pain, in a place Steve couldn't help him, makes his blood boil.

Bucky goes on. "I thought it might sit better, those memories, if I … did it on my own terms. Or something similar. Like replacing the old memories with something better."

His grim expression is so hard and determined that Steve can tell it's shielding a much more vulnerable response. 

"It didn't work?"

For a moment, his eyes are unfathomably sad. His hand tilts one way then the other in a single, highly equivocal gesture. "It didn't work. And it did."

He looks at Steve as if to say _you tell me what that means_. Steve reminds himself, as he's had to do so many times before, that being angry at the past is futile. All he can do is take care of the future. 

"I'm calling red then," Steve tells him. "On any kind of physical force. Not unless we discuss it first and do our best to work out what your boundaries are. That's on me."

At last, Bucky meets his eyes properly, and there's nothing in his face but relief. Steve wants more for him than that, though.

"Look, what if we get on my bike and go out somewhere? Spend the night making out on a dance floor."

That brings a small smile to his face.

"Is that a yes?"

Bucky shakes his head. "I'm gonna stick close to home for a bit."

That turns out to be an understatement; he spends twenty four hours barely leaving the sofa, though he does sort out six months of Steve's unarchived historical records while he's there. It's two days before he lets Steve touch him at all, and for another two days after that he's very clearly forcing himself to let Steve into his space. 

"Look," he frowns afterwards, closing the door behind him on a long day at the club, sounding tired, from more than just the labour. "I didn’t mean to get you messed up in all that shit from before. I'm sorry about that." 

Steve takes a moment to settle on the right response. 

"I want to be messed up in it. All of it." He folds his arms critically. "Don't pretend that's news to you."

Bucky shakes his head. "Oh, I knew that bit. It's just like you to get mixed up with things that are no good for you."

The familiar teasing note, that's been missing for a while, makes Steve's heart knot up. 

Pulling his phone out of his back pocket, Bucky takes his time swiping through options, until at last the beats start playing. 

"Well?" he prompts.

Steve gives it all a baffled look.

"I thought you wanted to go make out on a dance floor somewhere," Bucky says, executing a neat 360 degree turn. "Or was that a one-time offer?"

Steve manages not to pounce on him the way he wants to, just barely, but he's pretty sure those days of absence show up in the fierceness of his grip. Bucky rearranges himself to get comfortable in his arms, and lightly kisses his jaw. "You wanna go easy on me, tiger?"

"Yeah," Steve tells him, picturing an afternoon of laying Bucky out gently and covering him with caresses soft as raindrops. "That's exactly what I want."

He lets Steve kiss his mouth, even closes his eyes into it. "Sounds good to me too. Let's take it slow."

Steve can do that.

**

There's a few interesting things Bucky finds out when Thor gets a gig with an exhibition that ends up travelling around the state. The first is that he really fucking loves hotels and will never get enough of coming back to tightly tucked, fresh sheets that he didn't have to launder or fold himself. The second is that a couple of days away from Steve is weirdly re-energising, as his spare time becomes one hundred percent his own, but after a few days he misses the feel of Steve's arms so bad he wishes he brought an old t-shirt or a can of that coconut smelling spray he puts in his hair. 

The third concerns technology. By the start of the second week, they're talking dirty down the phone at two in the morning. It turns out that, not only does he really not mind Steve giving him low instructions right in his ear from a hundred miles away, but the distance somehow makes it hotter, the absence of any compulsion to obey except his own desire to do it. Then Bucky discovers the use and misuse of the Skype app, one night, when he starts jerking off part way through a call. 

"Am I distracting you from something, Buck?" Steve teases him. 

"I've had a long day," Bucky tells him, a bit slurred with fatigue. "You're not here. I've got the room to myself. What do you expect?" 

"Let me see you." 

There's a bit of an argument about that, but it ends up with Bucky propping his phone up on the bedside table. 

"All of you." 

He ends up kneeling in the covers, taking off what Steve tells him to take off, touching himself exactly how Steve tells him to. He's tired enough to drift with it, riding Steve's deep voice like waves, letting Steve string it out as long as he wants. When he comes, it's like confetti all through his head.

The afternoon he gets home, it takes him less than a minute to get himself straddled over Steve's thighs on the sofa, hands on his shoulders, murmuring, "Keep still, come on, let me have this," as he kisses Steve's cheek, his jaw, his mouth. "How come you taste so good?"

Steve groans at that, a bit harder than Bucky's eager kisses warrant, making him pull back.

"Well hello. You're the only fella I know who can get hard from being kissed on the face." 

With one of those hazily fond looks, Steve palms his thighs, slides around to his ass, fingertip tracing the shifting muscle. "How many fellas you kissed on the face lately?"

Bucky laughs and pops a few buttons on Steve's shirt. "Just the one. But he is hard fucking work."

"Bet he's worth it though."

Bucky kisses him, still laughing. "Don't tell him I said yes."

**

It's an ordinary weekday when Bucky comes back a little late from his club shift. He greets Steve with his usual _Hey,_ and darts a glance back as he's heading to the bedroom, as if there's a chance in the world he might not have noticed.

Steve of all people knew Bucky was attractive. But now he's matinee idol attractive, almost too beautiful to be true. As if his newly cut hair were a frame on an artwork. The dark swirl sweeping back from his forehead and the carefully textured layers above his ear point the eye more emphatically than ever to the handsome lines of his cheekbones and jaw, and the dramatic glitter of his eyes. He's clean shaven, leaving everything unveiled. The rough diamond look he'd brought out of prison had suited him so well that Steve had never imagined there might be this underneath.

The thing with them is that it only takes the slightest change to give him the feeling of falling for Bucky all over again, and rekindle that exquisite spark of first attraction. 

"Was this a spur of the moment thing?"

"I think it was a long time coming."

Bucky runs his hand through it, sleek waves giving way like liquid silk. Steve had loved the texture of his hair before, but now, shape has brought it alive. 

He must look too long. "You don't like it?"

"Can't tell from this far away," Steve says meaningfully, and a few moment later he's got his fingers in it for the first of a thousand times.

**

Some weeks, Steve comes in to work early on a Saturday, and lingers in the off-limits stairwell that leads up to his dressing room to watch Bucky doing his job.

Bucky tends bar now, on busy nights and whenever Stanley needs time off. With the casual subterfuge Steve knows well, he's taught himself some new tricks, and practised them with his endless patience around their apartment. He can spin a champagne flute around his index finger, through three or four quick twirls, then set it right-way-up on the counter and pour. He can throw one of those jumbo square ice-cubes in the air and catch it at the top of its trajectory so that it eases into a tumbler of gin and tonic with barely a splash. He can slice a lime into perfect semi-circles quick as a blink with the knives he keeps razor sharp. 

But it's not just the deft handiwork that holds Steve mesmerised through the evening. It's the effortless way he lights up the room around him, easily charming, practically magnetic as he reels in the queued-up patrons with a sparkling glance and a grin. In the hour before the cabaret show in the freshly fitted-out auditorium upstairs, the latest and most successful of Tony's strategies to lever curious suburbanites out of their lounge chairs and onto a spanking bench, the bar fills with the sort of customers who may never venture into the basement rooms. And Bucky is one of the things that keeps them coming back. 

Watching him shift the bright light of his attention from one patron to the next, moving quickly, Steve's heart aches a little to see the evidence of all that untapped potential. Steve has just had the biggest year of his professional life, and responded to it by shrinking back from the pressure of fame, and the distortion and compromises it brings. But Bucky, he's only got his foot on the first rung of the ladder of his career, wherever it might take him. Sure as anything, Bucky's going to outgrow what his life is now. 

Sometimes, Bucky sees him watching and catches his eye, the moment kindling between them and sweeping the room clear of everyone else in it, until Bucky quirks a reproving eyebrow at him and goes back to his work, banking that tension for later. 

This week, the evening turns bad. The crowd is restless and demanding. Steve has one of those nights he has to reach for commands like lines from old scripts, and can't make them come from the gut. Not long after midnight, a woman makes a complaint about unwanted groping in a dark corner of the Vault, and when the perpetrator is identified, he turns out to be part of a stag party that has circumvented the very clear ban in their terms and conditions. Evicting them takes a great deal of diplomacy, backed up by the threat of force, and, despite the number of times Steve's asked him to keep clear of anything that might re-entangle him in the legal system, Bucky helps out with it. 

Even if it all resolves itself harmlessly, with Bucky shaking the groom's hand as he closes the door on them, Steve can't help thinking about the next time. When his shift is done, all he wants to do is put Bucky on his bike and go home. 

"We're heading out," Bucky tells him, giving the counter one last wipe-down and hanging the cloth on its hook. "Val's birthday. Just the usual place. You gonna come?"

The memory comes back to him, a casually dropped invitation from a couple of weeks back. "Oh."

Bucky pulls him into the back room with the kegs and boxes, away from the last lingering customers, leaving the door open, presumably so that no one will think they're doing what they did on the last two occasions Steve was in here. 

"What is it?"

Steve can't even find the words to capture his general feeling of melancholy and dread, let alone express it as a convincing reason for Bucky to cancel his plans.

"Just not in a dancing kind of mood."

"That's too bad," Bucky says, hooking his fingers into the pocket of Steve's jacket to pull him a step closer. "How about a sitting on the sidelines and watching kind of mood?"

If it's the same mildly suggestive charm he's been using on his customers all night, it looks wholly different right now. Bucky is intensely focused, invested in Steve's answer, patiently waiting.

"Not even that." He adjusts the pale blue knot of Bucky's tie and smooths his hands over his black shirt, slowly tracing the curve of his collar bones, and hopes that's enough to hint at what kind of mood he is in. 

"Sunday morning in bed then," he says, kissing Steve's cheek, just above the grain of his beard. "I'll bring back something for breakfast."

There's a promise in the way he holds Steve's gaze before the turns to go.

Steve's so tired he falls asleep instantly, even with half the bed empty.

He's woken by soft voices, sometime close to dawn. Pulling his robe on over his underpants, he stumbles out. The projector is spilling enough light to illuminate half the room, including the huddle of guests on the sofa and sprawled on the floor in front of it. There's a couple of empty bottles on the coffee table already, and a packet of popcorn. Val is explaining some complicated point about the dance clip playing up on the wall to someone with his back turned. He recognises Wanda with her legs tucked up in front of her, and stretched out on the sofa arm he's pretty surprised to see Natasha. 

Her expression turns uncharacteristically open, revealing how hard she's struggling to reconcile the man in the lazily tied knee-length robe with the black-suited professional she knows from the club.

Flopped on the near end of the sofa, Bucky follows her gaze and turns to see him. He smiles easily, like his night just turned perfect, and beckons. 

"Move down," Bucky orders, so Steve can squeeze onto the sofa behind him. 

He leans back against Steve, warm and loose and smelling of an evening's health exertion and, just like that, Steve's dark mood lifts. The conversation resumes, noisily now. 

"It's all in the thighs muscles," Val is arguing, freezing the clip of a besuited dancer pulling himself up from the splits with both hands grasping the rim of his fedora.

"Not exactly," Bucky objects, and Steve can feel the laughter through their connection against his shoulder. "There's a few other parts of the anatomy to bear in mind, and that's why I'm in no hurry to give it a try." 

Steve lets the rest of it wash over him sleepily. Inviting people over isn't something he's done a lot of. Plenty of reasons – starting with how much he'd struggled with small talk in the years after Peggy, and ending with the fact that he works during most people's social hours. But it's started to feel less like a workspace and more like a home, lately, and by lately, he supposes he means since Bucky moved in. It feels pretty good to sits with Bucky nestled up against him and the talk fading into a dreamy background hum. He drifts in it for a long while before a change in tone snags his attention.

"Nope," Bucky says decisively. "I only got breakfast for two."

It starts with good-natured grumbling, and ends with the whole lot of them gathering their stuff to go home. 

"God, you look indecent," Bucky says a bit breathlessly when he comes back from showing them out. 

He slides one palm under Steve's robe, squeezing over one pectoral, then rests his wrist on the drooping robe cord to run his knuckles over Steve's abs. 

"This is not meant for public consumption," he goes on, voice dropping. "Definitely not happening again."

"It was … nice," Steve says dumbly. All the words in his sleepy head are too small for what's in his heart this morning. Bucky's so lovely, lovelier than ever, wearing the usual pleasure glow he gets from dancing, plus the faint effervescence of having friends in his home. He's a people person, Bucky. He gets a kinetic charge from mingling among them, and tonight he brought that back here and shared it with Steve. It hurts not to have the words to tell him. 

"Oh honey," Bucky says. "I'm sorry I made you go to bed lonely. Let me make it up to you."

He pulls his shirt off and wraps his arms around Steve's neck, and his kiss is so tender that Steve makes a desperate, needy noise into it and pulls him close. The projector shuts itself down into standby mode, leaving the faint rosy sunlight creeping through the windows. 

**

It's more than fourteen hours on the bus to get to the town his dad moved back to after the split. All that way for two beers worth of stilted conversation, an awkward hug at the end, and then the same grinding journey all over again, running through the whole thing on repeat in his head, asking himself whether he should have done it earlier, or not done it at all. 

And his dad was always going to be easiest of Bucky's reunions. 

It's late when he gets home at last. Steve's with a client, his voice softly travelling through the closed office door. Bucky stays to listen for a few moments to let the familiar cadence of it wash over him while he drinks a glass of water. Then he drops his bag and slips into bed, leaving the lamp on. 

He's drifting off when Steve curls in behind him. 

"I missed you," Steve murmurs between kisses pressed into his hair, behind his ear. "I know it was only a few days, but it wasn't the same."

"I'm too tired," Bucky groans under the onslaught of persistent, hot kisses. 

"Okay." He can feel the familiar motion of Steve pulling off his shirt and pants, and then he's slotting in behind Bucky, settling in slow and careful like he does when he's not sure of Bucky's state of mind. "How was he?"

"Ask me tomorrow. I'm this close to dead right now." 

"All right. Tomorrow." 

Bucky drifts for a bit, Steve's hand over his stomach, his hand on top to stop it wandering anywhere distracting. He can't quite drop off the edge though. The lamp's still on but that's not the only thing holding him back. 

"You're not asleep." 

"I missed you," is all Steve says, nuzzling into his hair to kiss him again . "It didn't feel right without you."

Bucky rolls over, gets up on his elbow and strokes Steve's face a couple of times. "Go to sleep. I'm here now. Look at you, you're worn out." 

Steve just makes a lazy affirmative noise and turns his face in to Bucky's neck. "I always liked having this place to myself, Buck. Because … I guess because of all the work I put into it. I got this silly flush of pride every time I walked in the door. But it was different without you. Didn't feel right. You fit here so good. It's perfect." 

"Steve." Bucky is too fucking worn out to have this conversation, and too fucking tired to head it off. "You're so beat you got no idea what you're saying." 

"Sure I know." Silence. Steve's breathing slow in the lamplight, with Bucky looking down on him. "Bucky. Do you think … not angling for any sort of promise here. Just putting the question out there. Do you think we could make this thing stick? Because I do. I want you to stay here for good." 

"You really are determined not to sleep. Why don't you ask me that tomorrow too? And in the meantime –" 

He climbs over Steve to the side table and fishes out the lube. Steve perks up at the sound of the drawer opening. 

"Thought you were too tired." 

"Oh this ain't gonna be any kind of fancy." 

All he does is get his palm just lightly slick and slide it into Steve's pants, stroking him slow and soft at first. Steve sighs deeply, and Bucky kisses his face while he works. "This what you needed, Steve? Someone to take care of you for a bit?" 

"I need you, Buck." He tucks his face into the shelter of Bucky's shoulders and neck, where Bucky is curled over him, seeking out the heat of his throat, the intimate scent under his arm. 

"We should do this more often," Bucky thinks aloud. "You're sweet like this." 

He thinks how no-one would ever guess from seeing Steve in his dom get-up how tenderly he can lie here under Bucky's hand, wrapped in the anticipation and slow-building pleasure. Steve's starting to roll up into his strokes now, chasing a faster rhythm that Bucky doesn't give to him. He's making half-pained sounds of pleasure, soft little _ahs_. He leans up to kiss Bucky's mouth, and Bucky follows him back down, losing his grip for a moment as he steadies himself on Steve's stomach and deepens the kiss, because while it's true he's too tired to get properly turned on, those feelings that would be arousal if he had the energy for it are channelling into something softer. He's kissing Steve's jaw, his neck, his mouth, while Steve takes himself in hand, jerking in an eager rhythm now. 

"Hey, hang on there." He puts his hand over Steve's for a while, just getting a feel for the strength of it, the keen tempo of his strokes. "Let me do this." 

Steve groans and lets his arm fall to the side, while Bucky wastes no time wrapping his hand back in place. As he pulls him over the edge, Steve's face screws up in pleasure. 

There's a store of cloths and a bottle of water by the bed, because Bucky is having every comfort he can get these days. He tidies Steve up and kisses the damp, salty skin, still thrumming with tenderness that won't tip over into arousal. He chucks the cloth and turns off the light and curls up with his arms folded on Steve's chest, knowing it's not a position they can hold for long. 

"Is that enough to see you off then?" he asks, soft. 

He can hear the smile in Steve's grunted reply; he's falling under already. Bucky curls up there for a while, just the two of them in the dark, Steve's body strong and steady underneath him. 

He leans up to kiss Steve's forehead, kisses his cheekbone. "Five," he whispers, and kisses the bridge of his nose. "Four." Steve makes a pained, far-away noise like he doesn't want to be asleep for this. "Three." Bucky kisses the tip of his nose. "Two." Kisses his totally unresponsive lips. "One." 

And then he stretches out along Steve's side and lets himself sleep at last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of the scenes in this update was optional. I think you know which one. If you don't like it, you can pretend it never happened, and I'm going to write the rest of the story keeping both options alive, because I understand that some things are non-negotiable!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One minute you look up and the future is there on your doorstep.

Steve never does find out much about how that first reunion went for Bucky, with his father, but from the request he gets two weeks later, he has to assume it didn't go too well.

It's a Monday, and Bucky's swapped shifts at the club to make room for a meeting with Bruce that goes so perfectly – not just the financial results, but also the pleasure of watching Bucky at his unflappable best, trading confident jargon with Bruce and approximating interest calculations in his head with the speed of a seasoned CFO – that they've barely got home when Steve gets him pressed up against the door, and then the wall, and then their very accommodating bed, where they spend the rest of the morning destroying each other with all the leisure in the world. 

They're lying in the soft aftermath of that, his cheek comfortably pillowed on Bucky's upper arm, and gentle fingers in his hair making him wonder whether he's ever been happier, when Bucky quietly asks,

"Have you got anything on next Sunday?"

"Mm-mm," he says into Bucky's skin. "Just clients in the evening."

He coasts on the rhythms playing over him, Bucky's heartbeat under his cheek and the soft scrape of his fingers. "Why? Buck?"

"Got somewhere I need to be."

It takes plenty of patience to tease out where he's planning to go, and who he's planning to see. 

"It's only lunch," he appends. "We'll be back on the bike and home in time for your clients."

It almost sounds like he wants a reason to keep it short, as if Bucky's mother needs to be confined to a neat ninety minute window. "All right then. Count me in."

The tension deflates. Bucky's caresses maintain their languid pace. But over the following days, he grows distracted, then irritable, then downright unreliable. Steve finds little tasks forgotten, or only half-done, and gets snapped at when he mentions them. 

The insomnia returns with a vengeance. Bucky stays out all night on Thursday, and Friday, then spends Saturday afternoon out cold on the sofa. His powers of decisiveness desert him altogether when it comes to choosing a bottle of wine to take with them and they end up taking two, both of which he seems deeply dissatisfied with.

By the time they take off on the bike, he's worked himself into that state that Steve thought he'd seen the last of: vibrating tension laid over almost total stillness, wound up as tight as a human being can go. 

It's a bit of a distance, through a couple of misty rain showers that keep Steve on his toes. He's glad to kick the stand down at the other end, outside a square little house with a low hedge of rosemary along the path and a row of well-tended rose bushes.

Steve's the one who knocks on the door when Bucky hesitates, and the first to hold out his hand to the tall, serious looking woman in the blue dress, salt-and-pepper hair pulled back off her face. 

"Come through, please Steve," she says, stepping back. "James."

His first impression is that she's cool-hearted. But that impression only last the length of the hallway. The instant the door opens into the kitchen, Steve can see how, among the family photographs – a wedding, two babies or three – there's one face that's everywhere, stuck in time. Bucky, smiling and handsome, untroubled and so painfully young. Bucky as he used to be right up until she lost him.

Bucky takes one look at her kitchen and says, completely disarmed, "Ma, I'm sorry," and he falls into her arms. 

Steve backtracks into the hallway, feeling like he's intruding on an intensely private moment, and slides the door closed. In the front room, he sits on the little lounge suite and gets a grip on himself, listening to the soft voices and long silences from the kitchen. If the flood of grief he'd felt fill that room hadn't been enough to make his heart heavy and his eyes sting, there's his own memories on top of that, as he looks around at the carefully filled vases and hand-stitched cushion covers and wonders what he'd say to his mom right now, if he could pull her into his arms and tell her everything she'd missed in the last fifteen years. 

He sits on the couch and thinks he's just met the one person in the world who has a grip on Bucky's heart that he'll never be able to compete with, and wouldn't want to. But he also thinks how hard it must have been, to care so deeply about someone, and spend twelve years locked away from them, pushing them away to keep them safe from prison politics, and then another year and a bit holding back. Bucky has mentioned his family so seldom it sounded like there must be bad blood there, some sort of betrayal. Instead, he's been shielding this loss and grief and guilt at the core of himself, in silence. Steve wishes he'd followed his instincts and pushed harder.

After more than an hour, Bucky comes out, looking puffy eyed and vulnerable, glancing Steve's way as if to check whether anything has changed between them. 

"You want me to stay?" Steve asks.

When he shifts over, Bucky falls onto the couch beside him. "Yeah. I don't think lunch is going to happen though."

"Come here."

Bucky leans into him, turning his face into Steve's shoulder, and says in a voice that's clearly a breath away from losing it again, "It thought she'd be angry."

"Let me guess," Steve says after a few moments. "She loves you and she thinks about you every day and she wants you to be happy." 

"She should be angry with me, Steve." Bucky pulls back enough to say it. "I fucked up and then I was stupid. I mean really unbelievably stupid. Attitude like you wouldn't believe." 

"This something you should be telling me?" 

"I already told her. I just need a break. It's – a lot." 

He gets his arm around Bucky properly and pulls him in, and it's the right thing to do, judging by how Bucky slumps against him and stays there for a good long while. 

"I said I had to check on you," he says a little wetly into Steve's shirt, eventually. "You seem okay. I'd better –"

"Sure. I'll be out here waiting. You know I'm a sure thing, right? No matter what happens in there."

"Thanks," Bucky says, and the door closes behind him. 

It's Winifred who comes out, another half-hour later, with a peppermint tea. 

"I'm happy to meet you, Steve," she says, pulling over a little table to set it in front of him. "You'll have to excuse my hospitality, I'm a little distracted today."

"You have a lovely home. I'm happy to be here."

"Thank you for bringing him back," she adds, as if he'd done a lot more than just the driving. 

"Glad I could help."

Bucky comes out behind her, running his fingers through his hair, a nervous gesture Steve has very rarely seen on him.

"Steve, I'm gonna stay here tonight." He hesitates, makes that gesture again. "There's a spare bed. You could have the sofa. If you –" 

"Sure thing." A bit of the tension drains out of Bucky when he says that, and he thinks he feels the same response from Winifred too.

He drinks his tea. They don't say anything, the two of them, but they're angled towards each other, like there's still a lot they haven't had a chance to say yet.

"I'm thought I might go for a walk," Steve announces. "Stretch my legs a little. You want me to pick something up for dinner while I'm out?"

When he comes back, it's easier. Bucky and his mother are in the study, scrolling through photographs on a computer. The sisters he rarely mentions, young children who must be nieces and nephews he's never met. It sounds like Bucky's been delivering a heavily censored version of the last thirteen years, bringing his mother up to somewhere near the present date. 

"James says you're a one-on-one lifestyle coach," Winifred says, pulling her glasses off and letting them hang on their chain. "But he also says that's a lot more complicated than it sounds and you may as well tell me yourself." 

There's no warning in Bucky's face, so Steve goes with the truth.

"There's a sexual element to what I do. There are people who want dangerous things in the bedroom. I give them those things in a safe way. Hopefully in a way that helps them." 

"And you get paid for it?" 

"Sometimes," Bucky interjects wryly. 

"Is that how you met, the two of you?" 

He glances Bucky's way again, but his attention's in the same place it's been all afternoon.

"I offered Bucky a job, and he took it. His work is all behind the scenes though." Steve is relieved to know that's the truth these days. "Nothing on the kinky side." 

"There you go, Ma," he says sadly. "I've got that safe office job you wanted for me. Only took me twenty years to get there." 

He watches Bucky's ma, and thinks he gets it from her, the steadiness, the slowness to anger, the ability to quietly assess and plan while everyone else is wasting their time shouting. But looking at the pictures on the walls, it took him time to grow into it. Time and a whole lot of bad luck. She hasn't taken her eyes off her son the whole day, except to glance down at her hands now and then when he's hitting his limits and needs a moment of quiet. There's something about her, an intensity that's almost completely hidden by how still she is. He wouldn't have seen it if he hadn't learned to look for it in Bucky, a flicker of light in his eyes, hidden between casual gestures, squeezed between words. They're going to be okay, Steve thinks. He doesn't have any time for a world where two people like that can't find their way back to each other. 

"Your father told me about the money," she says softly, when they're sitting down to the chicken and salad Steve brought back. 

"I was working around to that," Bucky says looking at his plate. 

"We want you to keep it."

Bucky nods slowly, still looking at his plate. "All right. I know it's a bit much for me to start making this about what I want, after - after everything. But I want to give it to you."

Steve thoughts catch up at a frustrating, lumbering pace. Money. Bucky never spends money, except on his sleeve tattoo and his scrupulously observed half of the grocery shopping and, once in forever, a bottle of wine. The jeans he's wearing now are the same pair he wore the day Steve met him. He's been squirrelling away the earnings from three jobs, and Steve imagined it might be for a car, or a holiday, some symbol of freedom. But no, it's a debt he's trying to pay, and, until he purchased the building, Steve had all that money sitting in investments that he would have given Bucky in a heartbeat, if he knew that he needed it.

"Becca then. It was hers in the first place, all that money that went to my lawyers. Wasn't it?"

She raises a tissue and presses it hard against the corner of her eye, watching her son who can't look at her.

"Her kids," he goes on. "They'll need it one day."

"We all want you to keep it."

He picks sadly at the small hole in the cuff of his shirt. "I know that, Ma. But I can't."

Steve gets a glimpse of how two people so similar must have been to live with, one minute sharing whole conversations in a glance, and the next pitting their quietly intractable wills against each other, just as he's seeing now. 

"He's been running the financial side of my business for a while now," Steve tells her, trying to find something upbeat, a way past the heart-breaking impasse he's watching, "and he's got a pretty sharp eye for a deal."

She manages a wet sounding laugh.

"He's taught me a lot about compromise too."

Bucky recognises the reprimand in that, and shoots him a fierce look of betrayal that might have made Steve afraid of losing him, once upon a time, before he learned how steadfast Bucky's loyalty is.

"Think about it, Ma," Bucky says, sullenly, shooting one last glare Steve's way. "I wouldn't offer if it wasn't important."

They both end up in the single bed. Steve only goes in to say goodnight, but he can see at a glance that Bucky's worn down to almost nothing. Slipping in behind him, still dressed, he pulls Bucky back against his chest. He means to move to the sofa, later, but Bucky keeps letting out little sighed curses, and weakly saying _I should-_ then trailing off before he can articulate that elusive objective, and the only thing that seems to calm him is Steve's arms going tight around him, and Steve's wordless reassurances murmured in his ear. 

They go home after breakfast. Sitting on his bike, he watches them say goodbye to each other, speaking low, leaning close, and it's a three hour drive but Steve is going to do it every week until he doesn't have to watch them like this, leaning into each other like two halves of a whole about to be ripped apart. 

Bucky strides down the path and slides onto the bike behind him. "Come on, let's go."

His hands are fisted tight in Steve's jacket and his fast, shallow breaths are vibrating into Steve's back. With a nod to Winifred, Steve revs the motor and pulls out.

He's barely got five miles down the highway when he pulls up outside a little community park. 

"I'm going to get a tea," he says, heading for the little café stand. "I'll grab you a coffee?"

He takes his time with the order. Bucky's sitting on a seat by the pond, hunched over his knees, when Steve brings it over to him. It's immediately obvious from the tight way he's holding himself that he's not going to be able to speak, Bucky, who practically never so much as raises his voice. Steve puts the drink in between them and sits with him quietly. 

"I think I'm gonna take a walk," Bucky says eventually, sounding wrecked. "Have we got time?"

"As much time as you need. You want company?"

Bucky jerks his head in the negative. When he stands, Steve stands with him. "Hey." He puts his hand on Bucky's shoulder to steady him. "If you need anything, you call me. I'll be right here."

Bucky's eyes meet his at last, shrunken, his gaze all dizzy and washed out with emotion. "I don't even know where all this is coming from."

He comes, unresisting, when Steve pulls him into his arms, thinking thirteen years of holding all this in? I think I've got an inking where this is coming from. He holds Bucky tight against him until he's got himself back under control, and then he takes his walk while Steve calls to reschedule the afternoon's appointments, and then they're back on the bike, heading for home. 

He cycles through a few reactions when the first place Bucky heads to is the office, and none of those reactions are good. He can hear the clatter of things being pulled out of their drawers. 

"Steve." 

Bucky's hands are full of implements of pain, suddenly interested in things he's only ever cleaned before, and it looks like the excess of emotion is resolving itself, as it sometimes does with him, into anger. There's pinwheels, clamps, a metal studded flogger, and the sort of cane that will leave him bloody if Steve wields it at full strength. 

"Don't tell me you haven't been dreaming of using these on me," Bucky says, answering Steve's expression. 

For the first time in the long day, Steve feels overcome with weariness. "What do you want, Bucky?"

"I'll be tied to that rack. It doesn't fucking matter what I want." 

"That's true once we get started, but first we talk. We set boundaries." 

"Not today we don't. Are you gonna do this for me or not?" The anger washes out of him for a moment, leaving him plaintive, and all Steve can see is sadness. "I just want to stop thinking. I'm asking. You always say that's what you want."

He loves and hates that about Bucky, how good he is at reading what Steve wants, and either satisfying it or exploiting it. He doesn't think he has it in him to raise a hand against Bucky today. And he doesn't think it's going to help, either. He searches desperately for another way.

"I'm pretty sure I know how to distract you by now," he says eventually. "And I don't need anything in this room to do it. Come on." 

"Steve-"

"Come on."

He's naked under the rain shower by the time Bucky comes in and slumps against the door jamb, looking displeased.

"I'm waiting."

Bucky doesn't lose his scowl as he strips and steps into what Steve knows perfectly well is his favourite place in the apartment, if not the world. Their daily routines don't line up well enough for them to end up in here together very often. He's glad that they haven't done this before. 

"Stop thinking," he says, stepping back and pulling Bucky under the spray, which he turns his face up into. When he's allowed enough time for the hot water to work its magic, he gently turns Bucky and lays his hands against the wall. "Stop trying to stay in control. Just let me decide."

He gets his hand around the back of Bucky's neck and guides him forward until his forehead hits the tiles, and then he takes Bucky in hand and strokes him, slow at first, waiting for all that surplus of emotion to kindle into arousal, and then fast and tight, the surefire speed that gets him straight to his release. His face screws up when he comes, wracked with pleasure and relief. 

He's tractable enough to let Steve pull him out of the shower and wrap him in a towel, watching numbly while Steve dresses again and throws Bucky's clothes into the hamper. 

"Put your collar on for me. Nothing else." 

The anguish comes back into Bucky's face then. "I'm not … Steve, you were right. I'm not in any condition to play." 

"Yeah, I can see that. Put your collar on for me anyway." 

He's settled on the sofa when Bucky comes over to him, still naked, tugging gently on the collar. Steve pats the seat beside him. "Lie down."

He does, resting his cheek where directed on Steve's thigh and then turning his face into the denim like he expects to find comfort there. Steve strokes his hair and waits it out. 

"You've got one choice to make," he says a bit later. "And it's the last one you're going to make as long as you've got that collar on. Are we watching the Bourne movies, or a bit of Bond?"

Bucky's mouth turns up very slightly in a smile. "Bond."

There he is, Steve thinks. And they're going to be all right. 

"Okay." Steve strokes his cheek, his forehead, down over his neck to trail down his sternum. "You've been through a lot this last day, but it's over now. It's all going to wait until you're ready. You can leave this on as long as you need to. While you're wearing it, I make the decisions for both of us. All you do is lie back and let me. Clear?"

Bucky nods and pulls Steve's hand up to his mouth to kiss it and let it go.

"Okay. Are you cold? Do you want a blanket?"

He shakes his head, and that smile is back, the way he gets sometimes when he's letting go. Steve just strokes his arm and reaches out to the laptop to get the movie started. He stays that way all through the long afternoon and into the night, curled up permissively in Steve's lap or, later, folded in his arms, letting him touch exactly as he pleases. He's quiet, breathing deep, a bit untethered in his expression, but Steve only has to touch him lightly on the cheek and there he is, looking back like there was a wire strung between them, singing with tension. 

The collar stays on for a day and a half, and then he comes home from the gym to find all the neglected laundry is bagged up by the door, and Bucky's gone back to work. But he finds the collar hanging from the bedhead, in easy reach.

**

"We got the money worked out," Bucky tells him, four weeks later, when he gets off the bus from yet another visit." 

Steve passes him the spare helmet. "They took some of it?"

"All of it. Almost. There was a bit of compromise." He swings his leg over the bike and fits himself up nice and close behind Steve. "Ma's car isn't going to last much longer. The rest is for Becca's kids, with a bit more to go in every year. And my dad – he's got some chores around the house he needs to do. I'm going to help him. I'm gonna need a few days off, maybe a week."

"Sure, Bucky. Just say when."

In the light traffic of late afternoon, it's a quick trip to the club, and Steve leans into the corners neatly, accounting for their twin weight with easy familiarity. 

"They didn't argue?" he asks when they're dismounting. 

"I told them I had a sugar daddy to take care of me." He laughs at Steve's reaction. "My Ma likes you."

"Glad to hear it."

"Don’t be. Her standards aren't that high."

He grins back over his shoulder as he fishes the keys out from his pocket and fits them in the lock. Steve hasn't forgotten how, when Bucky's in the room, he's the only thing she looks at, and thinks actually, yeah, her standards are probably pretty damn high where her only son is concerned. 

Putting his shoulder to the door, Bucky shoves it open and keys in the alarm code. He's jittery with an energy Steve hasn't seen on him before. What it feels like, to Steve, is the charge he gets from a well-executed scene. Bucky gets that from his family, from having everything mended between them.

As Bucky sets his workspace in order, flicking on lights, tucking his pack under the counter, pulling out the box of lemons and limes and tipping a dozen into the sink to wash, Steve helplessly watches his lean, capable hands.

"Do I get to meet Becca?"

Bucky looks at him warily. "She's the one who's angry with me." He pulls out a knife and board, then lays them aside. "I don't know if we're ever going to be okay."

"What about your dad?"

With a frown, he ducks down to switch on the electronics for the till. "He mostly just thinks that he let me down. Like he was a bad dad if he couldn't beat the entire US justice system and save me from my own pretty stupendous attempts to sabotage myself." When he stands back up, despite the bitterness in his tone, his expression is soft. "I'm gonna – there's an outreach program for prisoners I'm going to put him in touch with. He needs to be doing something. Not good with sitting on the sidelines." 

That sounds familiar, Steve thinks. "And what about you?"

"What do you mean?" Bucky asks, suddenly sharp.

"You're too smart to run my booking schedule forever."

There's a long pause. At least he's taking the time to think about it. 

"What's dumber than leaving a job I like to do something I can impress people with at parties?" Bucky says eventually. "Parties that I don't get invited to anyway? Come on. You're not getting rid of me. Better get used to it."

He comes around the bar to grasp Steve's lapels and give him one of those utterly casual kisses that still takes his breath away. "I got work to do now," he says. "And so do you."

**

"When was the last time you took time off?" Bucky asks.

They're walking home from the supermarket, taking the long way to avoid the late peak hour crush on the main road. There's a hush over the backstreets. The streetlights are going to come any moment. 

Steve shrugs. "Don’t remember. There's nowhere much I want to go. I'm not a swim-up bar kind of fella." 

The diary's free of clients tonight. Steve's stride is long and loose, and he's looking up at the way the sunset is brushing the glass facades of the city centre with orange, probably itching to get his fingers on his pencils. There's something other worldly about the empty street that makes anything seem possible. 

"There was a guy from New Mexico I shared a cell with for a bit. He used to talk about this mirror lake out in the desert, red cliffs all around it. It could be nothing. He wasn't that stable a person by that point." They walk another half-block in silence. "But I kind of got in my head to go there one day."

"Yeah?" 

That's all Steve has to say about it, but all of a sudden a ten-day gap opens up in his calendar, and the browser bookmarks are full of review sites for cheap highway motels, and then they've got the barest of bare necessities in a duffel bag slung over the back of his bike.

It's long hours on the road, clutched up behind Steve, watching the landscape go past. Once they leave the city outskirts behind and hit the highway, the sense of freedom is almost too heady to bear. At this speed, there's nothing they can't outpace. 

The first motel they stop at, the door's barely shut when he's pushing Steve up against the bed, onto it, crawling over him. They're tugging clothes off each other piece by piece, the air hot with arousal between them, until it ends in a dry, frantic grind and an orgasm that makes him bury his face in Steve's neck to muffle the cry that breaks out of him. After, Steve turns him on his back and kicks the jeans off his ankles and licks him clean until he's boneless. 

They have fried chicken in the hotel diner and Bucky tells the waitress good natured lies about who they are and where they're going. Steve fucks him up against the shower wall afterwards, steamy and slow, while Bucky's hands grasp weakly against the tiles and he lets his head fill with the surrender of it, of Steve claiming a space inside him, like he could permanently change the shape of Bucky's flesh. 

The beds are singles, despite Steve's hotly voiced objections, because Bucky knows that with his record, if it comes to a fight in a place like this, he's got no chance of winning. He squeezes into Steve's, thinking of it as temporary, but Steve's grip on him in the unfamiliar place is firm and good, and before he knows it, the sun's coming through the blinds. 

"You don't think we should mess up the other one a little bit?" Steve asks, smirking, and strips back the covers to lay him down for one of those blow jobs that leaves the sheets looking like a tornado hit them.

There's two more days like that before they reach their destination. The trail to the lake is closed for maintenance, and looks like it has been for years. They buy a dusty postcard of it from the town store, and it doesn't look all that, except that the journey they took to get here would make a muddy puddle look like an oasis, and the sky, Bucky didn't know the sky could feel this huge, shimmering all around the edges with heat. 

Steve takes it harder than he does. His head is bowed down on an angle Bucky doesn't like to see, when they're sitting in the small bar out front of their hotel in the evening, drinking beers that warm quickly in the heat. Bucky already knows he can't explain it to Steve, because he couldn't have explained it to his younger self either, just how good it feels to be able to look up and see the sky, any of it, all of it, any time he wants to. Instead, he reaches across the table and takes Steve's hand in his, squeezes it gently, and says, "Thanks." 

When Steve squeezes back, there's something rekindling in his eyes. 

"Hey," the woman behind the bar says gruffly as they're passing. "We got a honeymoon suite. Shouldn't you be using it?"

She says it like an accusation, and hardly meets Bucky's gaze when she tosses him the keys.

"Thank you ma'am," Steve says, grinning like that's all it takes to make friends. "We will surely do that."

Her face is pinched and worn by the dry weather. She doesn't look like she smiles much, but she smiles for Steve. 

It's a mercy not to be squashed up against each other in a single bed. They use every square inch of the honeymoon suite. It's one of those nights Bucky takes care of Steve, holding him down on the bed and sliding into him deep and slow until both their bodies are moving to Bucky's rhythm and Steve's whispering the dumb, tender things he only says on nights like this, when he lets Bucky screw all the responsibility, all the self-possession out of him.

But the best thing about it is one of its windowed walls faces east. He wakes up with the glimmer of the sun in his eyes, reaching out to him across thousands of miles of dry plains. Fresh air is flitting the gauzy curtains through the window he left open. Steve's out cold with his arm slung over Bucky's waist. He thinks, we could make this stick, we really could. The thought isn't new. What's changed is how he lets it be, and lets himself believe it, and how simple it is to do.

On their last day, a guy Steve gets chatting to at the gas station tells them about a back route to the lake, off an old wagon trail. Despite Bucky's regularly delivered pronouncements that it's going to be a decade before someone finds their coyote-gnawed bones, they make it to the lake with nothing worse than a little sunburn, and Steve takes a picture of him balancing on a dead log with the afternoon sun turning the water's surface into mercury puddled around his feet. When Steve shows him the photo, it's just like Rodriguez said, like he's walking on another planet, light years away from this fucking wreck of a world. 

They go to bed early, with glasses of ice for their sunburn, and lie in the dark with the windows open, elbows just touching. 

"Where do you want to go next time?" Steve asks softly over the muffled beats from the downstairs bar. 

"Uh-uh," Bucky replies. "It's your turn. There's gotta be something in the country you want to see."

"Yeah. There is," Steve says, and reaches down to hook their fingers together. "You choose."

**

Just when Steve is starting to think the honeymoon fervour of their sex life is about to settle down into something comfortably grown-up, he comes home one morning to find Bucky down on the floor, on a beach towel, doing one-armed push-ups with a deadly focus on his brow. The sight of him wearing nothing but a little pair of white shorts and a gleaming layer of sweat over the thick muscles of his back is enough to send Steve's mouth dry. But on top of that, he recognises from the total lack of equipment, apart from the towel, that he's walked in on Bucky doing one of the routines that kept him built up in prison, and there's something so hot about that that he's yanked Bucky (not unwillingly) off the floor in a moment and started steering him towards the nearest flat surface. 

He walks Bucky, laughing, towards the office until he's backed up against the open door. 

"I gotta have you," he slurs out, sneaking tastes of his neck, his cheek. "I want to clean you up with my tongue."

Bucky is mildly protesting, still laughing, until Steve detaches himself from Bucky's neck just long enough to fish out a hook and cuffs and uses them to affix his hands to the top of the door. 

"Don't close them." Steve gives a protesting moan against Bucky's shoulder. "Are you hearing me?" 

"I want you." 

"Yeah, you got me Steve, you always got me, but you are in no state to run a scene right now and those cuffs are staying open." 

Steve can't help noticing how he's protesting with his words, not fighting Steve's grip, trusting Steve to hear him. 

"You think you can't wreck me without tying me to something?" Bucky goes on, softer. "I know you better." 

Then Steve is laughing too, and bending down to nuzzle at Bucky's neck a little, nipping the tendon between his teeth and pressing hot kisses into the muscle, all while Bucky placidly leaves his hands just exactly where Steve put them. That's what drives Steve crazy, the fact that his body has gone totally permissive, no fight in him. He's quite content to be pushed around a little, that much is obvious when Steve gets down on his knees and noses against his shorts with a low, hungry sound. He smells so sexy, all that clean sweat and dirty intentions, that Steve could get drunk on it. He licks hungrily over the ridges of Bucky's abdominals, then flicks his tongue hard into his belly button, that deliciously vulnerable point that makes him jerk and moan, helplessly responsive. 

But he slows it up, kissing over the worn cotton of his shorts and the hard muscle beneath, spreading his caresses around lavishly until he finds the defined ridge of arousal and works along it with his mouth, sucking at the tip until he can taste the leaking heat of him through the fabric. When he glances up, Bucky looks nothing short of transported. 

"Hey, stud," Bucky says, blinking his eyes dizzily into focus. "You got yourself under control now? You can put these on properly if you want to." 

His wrists are still in the open shackles.

"If I want to?" 

"All right, I want you to," Bucky says on a breath. 

Steve closes the cuffs slowly, drawing out the grating sound and watching the colour deepen in Bucky's cheeks. After that, he's got all the time he could want to tilt Bucky's chin in his fingers and kiss him, light and sweet, the way he loves best when he can use it to get Bucky good and worked up, practically steaming with impatience, but still letting his body mould itself to Steve's desires. 

Back down on his knees, he pulls the little white shorts down to mid-thigh, just to hear those reluctant little _"uh"_ sounds, accompanied by a half-unthinking thrust of Bucky's hips. He licks at the sticky tip of Bucky's cock, sucks the taste of him into his mouth and goes back for more. With his hands pinning Bucky by the hips, he can suck him off good and slow, glancing up to catch the dark flutter of his eyelashes, and the glistening planes of his chest. 

He still can't explain why Bucky has this effect on him – and these days he's long past making any attempt to unravel that mystery. When it comes to blind obedience, or trembling need, or sheer erotic abandonment, Bucky's not even on the same scale as some of the subs Steve's worked with. But that breathy sigh, just faintly audible; that sudden glassy glimmer of light trapped and held in his slitted eyes; that reluctant shudder, Steve's helpless for it, for every hard-won reaction. There's no one else for him, he's known that for months now. 

Bucky telegraphs his responses a lot more generously these days, and right now they're working in sync, both of them hungry for his pleasure. 

"Steve," he's murmuring, eyes closed, over and over, as Steve takes him in hand at last. There's no give in his flesh now. He's hot and hard in Steve's grip, dripping steadily and rolling his hips into Steve's strokes. He sighs once, and the chain of the cuffs jingles; then his whole body bows out from the hook, pulling taut as Steve milks it out of him, every last drop.

He's so worked up, himself, that it only takes a minute of attention to his own arousal, wet head sliding through his fingers to nudge against ]the clammy skin of Bucky's thigh, before it's all over for him too. 

He leans against the door, where Bucky is draped like an extremely well satisfied curtain. He's stunned by the suddenness of it all, and happy, above all happy that they can come together like this, that he can read Bucky well enough to do it, that Bucky can let himself be read. Two years ago, he might have laughed at the idea that something so close to vanilla could leave him quivering with satisfaction down to his fingertips. But there it is. 

He gently thumbs at the trace of a frown line between Bucky's brows, and Bucky drags his eyes open to look at him. 

"You're in a mood today," he asks quietly. "What is it?"

Steve makes a dumb noise of resistance, because it's a lot of things, and some of them he doesn't want to say out loud. 

"Come on, Steve. Out with it." 

"I can't." He gestures to the cuffs. "Not like this." 

Bucky's brows go up meaningfully. "Well." 

Moving slowly, Steve releases him, and slides the cuffs off to rubs his wrists. Bucky lets him, unresisting, the two of them comfortably right up in each other's space. He focuses on the softness of the inside of Bucky's wrist, and lets the words find their way out. 

"I want to get married. I want to ask you."

There's pain there, Steve can see, under the shock.

"Yeah I know," he goes on, without waiting for an answer. "You're not in the right place to want that."

"I got-" He grabs Steve by the shoulder. "Hey, stay here. I got to get used to it. There's a lot of things that are still so new. You don't know what it's like. I'm a different person than who I was back then. I'm still getting the hang of … who I am. How'm I gonna do that if I'm all swallowed up in someone else?"

Steve knows "no" when he hears it, and he knows that what he's hearing is not that, not exactly. 

"I'm pretty sure I already got the hang of you," he says fondly. "But I don't mind waiting. I can give you time to catch up."

He hangs the cuffs on the door handle and goes to tidy up those breakfast dishes. 

**

This is how Bucky makes it happen.

It starts with dinner, at one of those fashionably casual places where reservations are mandatory and ties are frowned on. The booking portal demands a credit card number, and Bucky still gets the faintest thrill from tugging it out of his wallet, tilting the gleaming hologram into the light. 

It's not as excruciating as Bucky expects, eating there. It's comfortable, even, reminding him of dimly remembered places they went to as kids, the same pleasant vibe, even if the water's always got bubbles in it these days. It's too busy for anyone to notice how he has to make himself hold his fork loosely, schooling himself out of the messy shovel grip that was the way you showed in prison that food was just another thing you didn't give a fuck about. 

Turning down the intimidating degustation menu, they pick their way through a sashimi entrée so decoratively garnished with curls of pickled radish and wisps of red pepper that Steve looks for a second like it's going to break his heart to put it in his mouth. 

"Good?" Steve spends the whole main course asking, even though Bucky cut him off a bite the moment the plates came out. 

"It's great, Steve." It's the tenderest steak Bucky has ever put in his mouth, to be honest. 

Steve's all smug, knowing smiles on the other side of the table, while his foot presses up against the inside of Bucky's underneath it. 

He's pretty easy like this, and pretty easy all round. Bucky already knows that happiness is reflective for Steve. Being here makes him happy. Knowing that Bucky had to reserve two weeks in advance makes him happy. Forking over another spoon of the glorious buttery mash that Bucky was adamant he didn't want makes him happy. Bucky letting him pick up the check at the end will make him happy. All Bucky has to do is find ways to make him acknowledge his blind spot when it comes to getting his own needs met, and that's something they're both getting better at.

They walk a little, afterwards, through a neighbourhood that's younger than the industrial quarter where Steve's warehouse is. Some of the shops have kept their art deco curves and stained glass panels above the doors. The streets are friendly-busy, the dinner crowd finishing up and the late crowd just getting started. 

They stop outside the bookstore with the armchairs in the corners, where Bucky used to sit on his days off, and pretend to read, and listen to the soft flutter of pages and the everyday, unwittingly poignant conversations around him, thinking how bizarre it was that all this real estate and money could be devoted to nothing but ink on paper. A street sweeper goes by behind them with a mechanical rumble. Steve's looking at an architecture book, photographs of early skyscrapers. 

"Do you still want to ask me?" Bucky says. 

Steve's expression, reflected in the glass, reveals that he recognises immediately what the question is. 

"Every day, Buck." 

That’s when his heart starts beating. 

"I can't do the dress-up." He swallows, mouth suddenly dry. "There's too much I'm still making up to my family. It has to be just you and me signing the papers." It feels real, saying that, in a way it hadn't before. "So long as you don't ask for more than that, then yeah. I want it too."

Unbelievably, he's nervous, though in his bones he knows that Steve's the surest thing he's ever had. For a moment, he isn't sure what he expects Steve to say, but Steve answers by stroking his fingertips along Bucky's cheek, and curling them behind his ear, and pulling him into a kiss. 

Bucky shakes his head at himself. "Damn it, I don't want to wait for you to ask. Let's get married. Will you – do you want that?" 

It happens exactly as Bucky described it. They're married at half past eleven. Steve has two clients in the evening. They've got hours in between to work each other up, slowly, over and over, feeling the difference that those platinum bands make, and don't make. He wonders if Steve's going to take his off, for the first session. He doesn't.

**

His dad's not much of a talker, and the weight he's carrying around from things that happened thirteen years ago is something Bucky isn't sure he'll ever open up about. They don't talk about the divorce, either. But it's easier every time he comes here. 

They're building a fish pond in the little garden, and Bucky's crouched down to even out the grouting on the last row of pavers when his dad lays down his trowel to speak. 

"That outreach program you put me onto. They're doing a guide book. For when the men get released. And before. To, you know, get them thinking ahead."

Bucky props his forearm on his knee and looks up at him, with the sun behind him. "Yeah, Dad?"

"You should write something, about how to get back on your feet. You've made a good job of it. Makes me proud."

Bucky has to go back to that grouting really quickly, because he's too old for the way that scrap of praise makes him feel. Way too fucking old. But maybe there's a part of him that's never going to stop being a little boy whose dad's opinion means the world. He gets it under control, still fussing with a misaligned paver.

"Sure, Dad. Let me think about what to say."

On the bus on the way home, with the dark landscape flying past, he types it into his phone. Don't expect it to happen quickly. Get work, if you can, anything legal. Find people who care about you. Find something you love to do. Leave it behind you, everything that happened in that place. Remember that it's not going to be this way forever. Trust the right people. Give it time. Go easy on yourself. 

He dozes for a bit after that, feeling lighter. When they pull in for gas, there's a Harley parked by the diner. He takes a photo of it and sends it to Steve. 

_Made me think. Pick me up from the bus station tomorrow?_

Steve must have gone to bed early because the answering message doesn't chime on his phone until the morning. 

_I'll be waiting for you,_ Steve says. _Miss you too._

**

Sometimes Bucky comes home when Steve's just finishing up a session, a good one that leaves him sunnily fulfilled, almost more than his client. He's vulnerable like that, Steve, sitting on the sofa with his client and basking in the glow of a jointly achieved success. His guard goes down even further than usual, the few defences he has stripped open by ninety minutes of raw trust embodied in those unlikely implements of leather and steel. Sometimes it gives Bucky just an instant of jealousy, seeing him be like that with his clients, especially the ones who are in pain, the sort of pain that Bucky doesn't need so much help with these days.

But then Steve will turn to him as he closes the door, and all he says is _hey,_ or _hi Buck,_ but there's something in it that narrows the world down to just the two of them. He's almost embarrassed in those moments, for how much Steve has got written across his face, and he has to break the mood with a curt nod and go reboil the kettle to top up the client's tea, in case something similar is showing on him too. 

Bucky has had lots of time to think about the person he wants to be, and right here, in this apartment where he stepped through the door more than a year ago into a sense of safety he thought had vanished with his childhood, this is where he's had the chance to finally be that person. Needy is one of things he's worked hardest on not being; he's wasted too much of his life already to tarnish what he's got now with unnecessary doubts. But those moments, the way Steve looks at him, he can live off those for days, practically glowing with the certainty they put in him. 

So sometimes when those moments happen, it's not by accident. Bucky says _hey_ back, easy as anything, as he hangs his jacket on the coat rack by the door and plucks another one of Steve's paperbacks off the bookshelf to read in bed while he waits.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last scene is specifically for Vaysh, and ginger_angel, and CJAndre, whose simultaneous generous comments on chapter 2 helped me re-find the love in this story and showed me the way to the ending it needed. 
> 
> And speaking of which, we're really at the end now. Thanks one last time for your comments, your encouragement, and your patience with the wobbly bits. I've written 100,000 words in 6 months, which is pretty amazing for me. Could never have happened without these two beautiful characters and all the talented writers who made them so utterly compelling.


End file.
